Candy Curse

I have a confession to make. I am a Candy Crush addict. Sigh… what the hell is it with this game??? What’s so appealing to combine reds and greens and yellows and…

I don’t know!

I am proud of having never paid a single yen for the game and yet having made it to level 299 at the moment. In the Odus part, I am currently stuck at level 125 and just can’t get over it and in candy crush soda (with which I started only a few weeks ago) I am at level 54… that’s how addicted I am.

In the past I used to read books on my commute home, now I am playing candy crush, for more than a year or so already. I have several excuses: I have a demanding day-job that requires me to think a lot (don’t get me wrong, I like my job about 80% of the time, maybe even 90%) and whilst riding home to my other, even more beloved job: writing, I find it just wonderfully relaxing to crush some candies.

Usually, I am done with my five lives that I get for free in each category by the time I arrive at my home station. Further, I am candy crushing during lunch break for a few games and then sometimes while watching some series or a movie on hulu. If the movie or series is really thrilling, I quite naturally stop playing but if the movie is not gripping me a hundred percent on the candy crush goes.

So far I have managed to control the candy crushing in that respect as that it neither interferes with my writing nor my day-job. The one thing that is suffering from candy crushing is the amount of books I read. I feel bad about every commute I am wasting on candy crush instead of reading, however most the time I am just too tired to generate the amount of concentration necessary for reading. Another aspect coming into play here is that the nature of my job changed entirely 3 years ago. The current job is more interesting than what I did formerly, but it also requires more brain juice which is making me more tired.

So, there I am, huddled into a corner of the train, squeezed in by my fellow commuters, trying to get those striped candies and packed candies and fishes and shit instead of reading books… sigh…

I do not see a cure. I don’t even know how many levels candy crush has, but I seem to be not even half way through the map. I am astonishingly patient too with candy crush. In every episode there are a few hard games that sometimes cost me weeks to conquer. I stand there in my train corner and try and try relentlessly. I wish I was submitting my novels to cold and unfeeling and mean agents and publishers as relentlessly!

I am just not getting tired of this stupid game. It reminds me of that game in Start Trek Next Gen, where Wesley Crusher fights against his fellow crew members getting addicted to thinking a pallet into a funnel. Is my iPhone sending out similar vibes? I guess it’s the satisfaction of completing yet another level without help of „boosters“ bought by money.

For the moment I am humbly accepting that I am too tired for reading on the commute home and I’m hoping that I will just hit some game somewhere that I can’t crack and that will result in getting too bored to continue and give up on the whole bloody thing… but until then – happy candy crushing… sigh.